Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The Toronto Maple Leafs are expected to feature prominently at tomorrow’s NHL awards, with Auston Matthews heading in as the favourite to win the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year. It would be the team’s first Calder in 51 years, and first major award of any kind since Jason Blake took home the Masterton in 2008.

But Matthews isn’t the only Maple Leaf with a shot at some hardware. Coach Mike Babcock is a finalist for the Jack Adams based on his work in his second season in Toronto. Leafs fans are a little more familiar with that trophy than they are with the Calder since Babcock is the third Toronto coach in the last 25 years to earn finalist honours early in his tenure. Pat Quinn was the runner-up for the award in 1999, while Pat Burns won it in 1993.

The similarities between the three coaches don’t end on awards night. So today, let’s compare and contrast the three most important Leafs coaches of the modern era, and their impact both on and off the ice.

Hiring drama

Babcock’s announcement that he’d chosen to join the Maple Leafs still ranks as one of the more dramatic moments in recent NHL history. And while his ending up in Toronto has come to feel somewhat inevitable in hindsight, that certainly wasn’t the case at the time. By the eve of the announcement, the Sabres had emerged as the favourites based on what was reported to be a monster offer from Terry Pegula.

So what does Babcock do with his new amazing long term #Sabres offer, accept? He wouldn't try and shop it back to #Redwings would he?

The Leafs were still in play, but they weren’t alone, with San Jose lurking and the Blues rumoured as a possibility. At one point, it even seemed like a return to Detroit could be possible. Speculation reached a fever pitch — remember when we were all analyzing private-jet flight plans? — and as the clock ticked down, the Sabres seemed to have their man. According to some reports, the Leafs had already moved on to Guy Boucher as their plan B.

Then, the bomb dropped. The Leafs had won the auction, Babcock was headed to Toronto, Sabres fans were furious, and all hell broke loose. Like I said before: highly dramatic.

And that’s why it may surprise younger fans to know that the Burns hiring was even crazier.

Take all the madness of the Babcock situation, and then imagine that nobody knew he was even available to take a new job in the first place. That’s how it went down with Burns, who was hired as the Leafs new coach on May 29, 1992, despite still being the coach of the Montreal Canadiensthat morning.

While he’d taken heat for the Habs’ disappointing playoff run, Burns’s job wasn’t thought to be in any danger. But he dropped the stunning news that he was quitting as Montreal coach at a noon news conference, only to then slide the microphone over to his agent, who announced that his client had already been hired by Toronto. Hours later, Burns was wearing a Leafs jacket at a press conference in Toronto. The entire story unfolded in fewer than five hours.

By contrast, Quinn’s 1998 hiring was fairly straightforward. The team had fired Mike Murphy three days earlier, and didn’t take long to settle on Quinn, who’d been dismissed earlier in the year by Vancouver. No flight plans, no surprise news conference, and no jaws dropping around the hockey world.

Edge: Babcock, but only because of the timing. If we’d had social media back in 1992, the Burns hiring might have broken hockey Twitter forever.